LAST week, Brian's nieces came to visit me, women in
their late 30s, wanting to know about their uncle. Brian was gay and,
as a consequence, not much discussed in the family. And there were rumours
about the circumstances of his death.
So the three of us sat around and talked, exchanging stories, memories
and ideas about a remarkable person. And once again Brian was alive. Funny,
original, intelligent, necessary.

I forget in
which of Woody Allen's Manhattan movies it occurs, but the scene remains
vivid. Woody leaves his oncologist's office so elated with the good news
that he doesn't have cancer that he starts to caper down Fifth Avenue,
rapturously embracing the life he'd expected to lose. Life is important
to Woody, who tells us that although he accepts the fact of death, he
doesn't want to be there when it happens.

Brian, a film-maker, had an Allen-style epiphany, ringing
me to say that he wasn't terminal after all. In fact, it wasn't even cancer.
You knew that as soon as he hung up he, too, would go dancing through
the streets of Melbourne.
But the grim reaper was still waiting around the corner. A few weeks later,
while doing his Christmas shopping, Brian had a heart attack. A woman
who witnessed it later wrote to me saying that he'd jumped into the air,
as if he'd been harpooned, and fell flat on his back. Never regaining
that great consciousness of his, he died a few days later.

Between the reprieve from cancer and the coronary, he'd
reiterated his determination to sell his worldly goods and spend the rest
of his life travelling. A few years earlier he'd asked me to sign up so
that we could retrace the steps we'd taken over the decades. A year in
India, another in Egypt, a couple in Italy and in Greece. But I was addicted
to buzzing around the country like a Morteined blowie and declined the
invitation. In a quiet moment, thinking about Brian's solitary wanderings,
I said, ``Aren't you afraid of dying in a hospital in a foreign country?''
To which he replied, with characteristic wisdom: ``Every hospital is in
a foreign country.'' And so he died in the foreign country of a famous
Melbourne hospital, as familiar to both of us as the Shrine, Young &
Jackson's and the Exhibition buildings.

Brian sometimes joked about kicking the bucket in Venice,
finishing up on the cemetery island, close to famous expatriates such
as Nijinsky, Diaghilev and Ezra Pound. ``I'm looking forward to impersonating
Dirk Bogarde in Visconti's Death in Venice,'' he'd say, ``sitting on the
beach at the Lido, gazing with impotent approval on youthful beauty.''

I've been thinking about Brian a lot since the visit
of his nieces. I was 15 years old when we met and our friendship would
last for 40 years. Oh, it got a bit rocky from time to time as we'd argue
over everything from politics to Scrabble scores. But any doubts as to
his central importance in my life disappeared when he did. His sudden
departure was so profoundly shocking that, again and again, I'd forget
that he was dead. Or I'd see him, larger than life. I was on air at the
ABC one night when, looking up, I saw him on the other side of the glass
wall, standing in the control room with my producers. He wasn't some fleeting,
ghostly apparition but solid and substantial. For a long moment I was
lost for words and, later, found it hard to explain the sudden silence.

Before his death, another friend, Nugget Coombs, told
me how lonely it was to linger on. All of Nugget's contemporaries had
gone to God. ``Fortunately their secretaries survive -- because they were
all 20 years younger,'' Nugget would say, ``but to reach my age is a lonely,
lonely business.''

To lose a friend of any age is a lonely business. Brian
and I had gigabytes of shared memory, a vast database of experiences,
misadventures, anecdotes. We'd made films together, fought together, travelled
together, philosophised together. He'd become a member of my family, as
much an uncle to my daughters as he was to the women who visited me last
week. There were times when the friendship, like a marriage, seemed to
have gone on too long, when it was running out of energy or relevance,
but then it would come back, as strong as ever.

Like all old friends, Brian and I talked in shorthand.
A word, a phrase, was code for this anecdote or that experience. With
his death all that shared memory, the shared culture, the shared experience
of time itself, evaporated. It's not only the present and the future you're
denied by the death of a friend -- it's more the richness of the past.
It's the loss of yesterday as much as the loss of tomorrow that constitutes
grief.

Shortly before his death, Manning Clark told me he had
a ``shy hope of an afterlife''. Brian had no such hope. To him, like me,
death is death and you return to exactly the same state of nothingness
as in the eternity before birth. Like me, he used life's brevity, he used
his heightened sense of mortality to intensify his considerable delight
in existence. So when that fuse blew in his chest, when the light in his
skull went out, I, too, felt the darkness.

Brian no longer materialises in the control room and
it's a long time since I last thought I glimpsed him in a crowd. Yet he
has a strange habit of turning up in my dreams, where we pick up on the
arguments we were having 10, 20, 30 years ago. I find myself saying to
Patrice, ``Brian would have liked that.'' And sometimes it's Patrice who
makes the observation -- she loved him too -- whether in response to a
piece of prose or music. Or a sequence in a film.

My other lifelong friendship is with Barry Jones. As
with Brian, we share almost too many memories and, as we get older, wonder
which of us will be standing at the other's graveside mumbling words of
valediction. Given Barry's energies and, it would seem, indomitable health,
I expect he'll long outlive me. In fact, I'd forgive him the inevitable
Schadenfreude when he hears the bad news about yours truly. But as Nugget
discovered, and as I learned in relation to Brian, outliving friends is
a mixed blessing.

A friend is someone with whom you may think aloud. As
the 17th-century proverb puts it, there is no better looking glass than
an old friend. So when that mirror in which you see yourself is broken,
when you no longer have that person with whom you were able to think aloud,
that death is your death.